13 Mar 2010

I Say Gerald, This Shit Just Got Real...

I'm really fucking excited!

I've just had through the accommodation spec for China.

How this may seem like a small thing to get worked up about. Some facts about how big the rooms are and how many bathrooms there are? This should be enough to send any sane person into a catatonic state only surfacing to take on some more ale.

What it does for me is make me put the hood of my hoodie over my head and run around the room like Superman.

It has been a week of excitement in this regard (not running around like Superman - that's next week) as my current job was advertised and has been filled.

BY TWO PEOPLE!

This means one of two things:

1) I'm like a messiah when it comes to the teaching profession and my Jedi-like understanding of pedagogy is so vast that the only way to compensate for my leaving is to get two people to do my job.

2) I've fucked up so much that the only way the school will be able to unravel the matted, unwashed and infested rug of my mistakes is to get two people working on it full time.

I'm going with number one (although I suspect I may be wrong).

It's a strange feeling being involved with the interview process for your own job. I have to say I was also frustrated by my workplace's lack of imagination when it came to possible interview techniques. None of my suggestions were taken up. These included:

§ Wrestling on the field (yes Seb, it was muddy and yes Seb, they were all female),

§ Asking the candidates to hum the Brazilian national anthem,

§ Getting the candidates to demonstrate how a cat would perform star jumps,

§ Holding up a red card and asking 'if this card wasn't red, what colour would it be?'

§ Requesting that the candidates say 'penile dysfunction' without giggling.

In the end though the people who got the (my) job are both fantastic teachers and they will do exceptionally well.

What all these little things do is make it all seem very real. I only have fifteen weeks of teaching before I bugger off on the biggest adventure of my life.

I do however foresee a problem with my current levels of excitement. In that I still have to do my job. I have to do it well. Or I'll be letting the school, the department and the kids down.

There are only so many times that I can be asked 'Duke, have you done this?' and I reply with:

'FUCK YOU MIDDLE AGED LINE MANAGER! I'M GOING TO CHINA'

I suspect once. On my last day.

There is another slightly more sobering side effect of this unbridled joy that I feel. The more excited I get about it the more 'real' (in a hippity-hop kind of way) it seems to the Duchess. The more I skip about singing 'I'm Going to China' to the tune of 'La Cucarachia' the more she realises that I'm feking off 8,000 miles away in a few months. That's not to say she isn't excited for me, or that she doesn't understand why I'm going but that she knows that it will be really hard for her to be alone. She is scared of the possibilities. The what ifs. The maybes.

So I have a bit of a dilemma. Either, I can be a proper boyfriend, go a bit low-key on the whole 'YIP-A-FUCK-A-DO' and acknowledge all the support that she has given me in getting this far in my career; or I get t-shirts made up with a photo of my face hovering over China and a massive shit-eating grin slapped on my chops.

I can only imagine how tough it is to temper your excitement to assuage the one you're leaving behind, but if she's understanding enough to stay with you while you're away in another country (assuming this is the case from this post), I imagine she can handle the excitement. But some foot rubs and preemptive love letters wouldn't be terrible.

Ahhmm.. Hey look, you guys just took the lead, you're 9-12. Wouldn't get too uppity just yet though, especially since there are still thirty minutes left in the game...

Also the thing about two people taking your job just tells me that they've been SCREWING you all this time and they ought to have been paying you twice as much. Obviously. Since you were doing the work of two people.